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James Foley’s Choices

James Foley (second from right) and Clare Gillis (right), after being released by the Libyan government, in Tripoli, in May, 2011.Credit Photograph by Louafi Larbi/Reuters

James Foley’s reasons for becoming a reporter were modest but not small. During the summer of 2007, he enrolled at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. At thirty-three, he had a bachelor’s degree from Marquette University, an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, several years of experience teaching school, and a yearning for an occupation that would immerse him more immediately in the world.

In the spring of 2011, three years after graduating from Medill, he returned to discuss recent events in his life. Two weeks earlier, Foley, along with two other journalists, Clare Morgana Gillis and Manu Brabo, had returned from Libya, where they had been held for forty-four days by the Muammar Qaddafi regime before being released. The three had ventured beyond the front lines in that country’s civil war, come under fire from Libyan Army regulars, and been captured. They were beaten—Foley was smashed in the face and over the head with the butt of an AK-47–and they didn’t know what would happen next, but they were alive. A fourth member of their group, Anton Hammerl, an Austrian-South African photojournalist, had been shot and left to bleed to death in the sand.

During his Northwestern homecoming, Foley participated in a Q. & A. with Timothy McNulty, a Medill faculty member and former foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. At one point McNulty asked, “So why did you start doing this?”

“I guess, you know, some kind of romantic notion you have about yourself,” Foley said. “You want to be a writer. You want to see the world, you know. Fiction didn’t work out too well. Let’s try the real thing.”

Foley’s manner was unaffected and plainspoken, traits I encountered when he and Gillis came to New York, in 2012, for a charity auction that they had helped organize—of photographs donated by seventy photographers—to benefit Hammerl’s three young children. By then, Foley had returned to Libya (as had Gillis and Brabo) to witness the fall of Qaddafi. He had also published in GlobalPost—his primary outlet as a freelancer—a multi-part narrative of his ordeal. He described the giddiness of his captors immediately after he was taken into custody: “Their aggression gave way to a celebratory reenactment of the attack. Pretending their fingers were AK-47s, they shot into the air, laughing. I had seen this kind of behavior before. Soldiers often made light of an attack to mask the confusion and pain that inflicting violence must cause.”

Such reporting was an emblem of Foley’s empathy and self-awareness. As a Medill student, he had spent several weeks in Washington participating in the school’s National Security Journalism Initiative. In a class called “Covering Conflicts,” he was subjected to a mock kidnapping. “I thought that was scary,” he later recalled. “Ex-British commandos run and put a bag over your head. Shoot blanks by your head.” Scary, perhaps, but not enough to dissuade him.

After Libya, he was haunted by Anton Hammerl’s death and his knowledge that his own impulsive decisions might have played a part in it. “We started to advance slowly beyond the last checkpoint on foot. Anton said, ‘This doesn’t look safe. This seems a little crazy.’ The adrenaline was starting to race. There was a group of young teenagers around a car and they said, ‘Qaddafi forces are 300 meters away.’ I didn’t want to be the guy who said, ‘Let’s turn around.’”

In his talk at Northwestern, he said, “It’s a cautionary tale, what happened to us.”

Some of the things I’ll never be able to change but I wish that I could have…. I’m glad we’re talking about what we did wrong. We did a lot of mistakes that day. Conflict zones can be covered safely…. This can be done. But you have to be very experienced. You have to be very, very careful…. We didn’t follow a lot of those practices. So it’s a tragedy.

Even after listening to Foley’s descriptions of the terror he felt in Libya—“As the bullets began to stream directly over my helmeted head and shoulders, terror completely kicked in”—one can only dimly extrapolate what he might have apprehended in the moments before his diabolically staged murder, or, for that matter, in the stretches of solitude during the almost two years he was held prisoner. At Northwestern, he had been asked if there was anything he would re-do. “You have a close call. You need to really look at that,” he said.

That’s pure luck that you didn’t get killed there. Pure luck. And you need to either change your behavior right there or you shouldn’t be doing this. Because it’s not worth your life. It’s not worth seeing your mother, father, brother, and sister bawling. You’re worrying about your grandmother dying because you’re in prison. It’s not worth these things. It’s not worth your life no matter what romantic ideal you have, no matter what ethic you think you have. It’s never worth that. I’m thirty-seven years old, I should have known that a long time ago.

The following year he went to Syria to tell the story of that country’s war. He had gone to bear witness and give others a voice.

Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”